Hohenems Palace

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hohenems Palace
PalaceHohenems2.jpg
Creation time : 2nd half of the 16th / beginning of the 17th century
Place: Hohenems
Geographical location 47 ° 21 '46 "  N , 9 ° 41' 24"  E Coordinates: 47 ° 21 '46 "  N , 9 ° 41' 24"  E
Hohenems Palace (Vorarlberg)
Hohenems Palace

The Hohenems Palace was the residential palace of the Counts of Hohenems in the small Vorarlberg town of Hohenems in Austria and is still privately owned by the Waldburg-Zeil family to this day .

history

Inner courtyard of the Hohenems Palace

The Hohenems Palace goes back to an aristocratic family from Vorarlberg who were originally entrusted as Reichsministeriale (provable since 1180) of the Welfs and the Staufers with the castle hat of the Reichsburg Ems (see Alt-Ems castle ruins ) and the supervision of the Reichsstraße to Italy. At the end of the Middle Ages , the family owed its rise to military merits, which Merk Parakeet I of Ems (1466-1533) had earned as a mercenary leader in the service of Charles V in Italy, and the marriage of Merk's son Wolf Dietrich (1507-1538) ) with Chiara de Medici (born 1507, married 1528). She was a sister of the Condottiere Gian Giacomo Medici (1498–1555), Margrave of Marignano from a Milanese family, not related to the Florentine Medici , whose younger brother Giovanni Angelo Medici was elected Pope in 1559 , on January 6, 1560 as Pius IV. was crowned and soon afterwards began to distribute benefits to his Milanese and Emser relatives. For the sake of their "friendship" with the new Pope, Ferdinand I raised the Lords of Ems to the rank of imperial count in 1560 .

The client of the Renaissance palace was Cardinal Mark Sittich III. von Hohenems (1533–1595), son of Wolf Dietrich and the Chiara de Medici.

Mark parakeet had also initially started as a seventeen a military career in the imperial service, but was by his uncle Pius IV. Bishop of Cassano (April 27, 1560), the governor of the March of Ancona (May 2, 1560) and papal legate at Viennese court, on February 26, 1561 made cardinal of the Roman titular church Santi XII Apostoli and, after a first attempt failed in 1560, made Bishop of Constance on November 10, 1561 . Mark parakeet spent most time in Rome and developed there too brisk construction activity, but also issued in 1562 a contract to build the new palace Hohenems to the Italian architect Martino Longhi ( " il Vecchio "), which from 1562 to about 1567 the shell created (Dating 1565 on a ceiling on the second floor).

The palace was expanded at the beginning of the 17th century (1603–1610) by a nephew of Mark Parakeet, Count Kaspar von Hohenems (1573–1640). During his reign, a Jewish community was also founded through a letter of protection from 1617 (see Jewish Museum Hohenems ).

After the death of the last ruling Count of Hohenems, Franz Wilhelm III., In 1759, his daughter Maria Rebecca (1742–1806) inherited the property. She was married to the Austro-Hungarian Field Marshal Franz Xaver Count Harrach - Rohrau - Kunewald (1732–1781). Their only daughter Maria Walburga Hereditary Countess Harrach-Lustenau-Hohenems (1762-1828) married Clemens Alois Reichserbtruchsess Count Waldburg-Zeil-Trauchburg in 1779 . In 1806 they became the ruling Counts of Lustenau .

In 1813 Clemens Waldburg-Zeil-Lustenau-Hohenems (1753-1817) acquired the Lustenau and Hohenems estates from his wife. Since his own four children had died, in the same year he adopted his nephew, son of the first ruling Prince Waldburg-Zeil , the Reichserbtruchsessen Count Maximilian Clemens Waldburg-Zeil-Hohenems (1799–1869), who after his death became his universal heir was determined. In 1840 the palace was converted into a barracks and from 1882 onwards it was renovated and inhabited by Count Clemens Waldburg-Zeil and his family. In 1912 his second son Georg married the Archduchess Elisabeth Franziska (1892–1930). In 1954 the eldest son Franz Josef (* 1927; a great-grandson of Emperor Franz Joseph I and his wife Elisabeth ) , who came from this first marriage, took over the palace and Glopper Castle from his cousin . Both properties are still owned today and are inhabited by Franz Josef Waldburg-Zeil and his wife Priscilla.

During the war, Count Anton Lanckoroński transported many parts of the collection in the Vienna Palais Lanckoroński to his friend Count Waldburg-Zeil at Hohenems Castle in Vorarlberg in the hope that they would be safe from bombing there. In 1947 the castle and its collection were badly damaged by fire, which resulted in the destruction of various parts of the Lanckoroński Collection. The amount of damage is difficult to determine because there was no complete inventory of the collection. An estimate is based on 120 lost works of art.

In the palace there is a restaurant and event rooms, which are operated by Palast Gastronomie GmbH .

architecture

The regular, three-storey structure with saddle roofs around a rectangular courtyard was planned by Martino Longhi . In the north and south there are two-axis corner risers under tent roofs , and the central axis is emphasized by a three-dimensionally structured arched portal. The Hohenems Palace is the most important Renaissance building in western Austria.

The Nibelungenlied manuscripts from Hohenems

The castle gained national fame as the place where the two manuscripts ("A" and "C") of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied were found .

An Alemannic scribe from the Upper Rhine Valley wrote the manuscript around 1220 based on an earlier Bavarian model. The Counts of Ems, who collected art and literature, in particular Jakob Hannibal I von Hohenems (1530–1587) and Caspar von Hohenems (1573–1640), probably acquired the manuscripts in the 15th or 16th century.

The rediscovery of manuscript C is thanks to the doctor Jacob Hermann Obereit from Lindau. He had a particular fondness for old books and writings . While searching for it, he was made aware by the Zurich scholar Johann Jakob Bodmer that there was a lot to be found in the castles , palaces and monasteries of the Lake Constance area . On Peter and Paul Day in 1755, Oberreit went to Hohenems to see his friend, the Oberamtmann Franz Joseph von Wocher, and through his mediation with the palace administrator, he was given access to the count's library in the Hohenems palace. Apparently he was given a free hand in his search.

Years later, on September 9, 1779, von Wocher traveled from his residence in Levis to Hohenems at Bodmer's instigation and found the Hohenems-Munich manuscript A here . He sent the volume to Bodmer and reported on it on September 10th: "... I found the whole considerable store of books, now near rotten, lying on top of each other in separate piles, and after a long rummaging through I finally managed to get the old poem: Das Liet to find the Nibelung… ”.

The two manuscripts came together with other objects and most of the pictures and portraits from the palace in 1803 to Bistrau in Bohemia , where the granddaughter of the last Count of Ems, the above-mentioned Maria Walburga, lived. In 1807 she gave the two manuscripts to her lawyer Dr. Cobbler from Prague ; Schuster, in turn, sold the younger manuscript "A" to the royal court library in Munich .

He sold the manuscript "C" to a dealer named Frickert during the Congress of Vienna and asked for 1000 guilders for it. Several interested parties, such as the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph , George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough and others, tried to acquire it, as did the Germanist and collector Freiherr Joseph von Laßberg , later owner of the Meersburg on Lake Constance, who had tried for years to come into possession of this manuscript. The latter finally got the necessary funds from his patroness, Princess Elisabeth zu Fürstenberg . In 1853, the Donaueschingen court chamber of Prince zu Fürstenberg acquired the Laßberg library including the priceless manuscript. Since the sale of the Princely Fürstenberg Library in 2001, the manuscript has been kept in the Baden State Library in Karlsruhe as the property of the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg and the Federal Republic of Germany .

and display information about the image
Panorama in the city center

literature

Web links

Commons : Palace Hohenems  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Entry on Hohenems, Vorarlberg in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon ) (information on the Hohenems Palace and the Nibelungenlied at the end of the aeiou entry.)
  2. ↑ Kolekcja Lanckorońskich , Zamek Królewski w Warszawie; accessed December 31, 2016.
  3. ↑ PALAST Gastronomie-GmbH. In: firmenabc.at, accessed on July 6, 2011.
  4. ↑ The history of the palace of Hohenems. ( Memento of the original from December 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) Palast Gastronomie GmbH; accessed on December 31, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.palast.at
  5. ↑ Eberhard Thiefenthaler: The discovery of the manuscript of the Nibelungenlied in Hohenems. In: Montfort . Volume 31, 1979, p. 304